Download or read book Getting Garbo written by Jerry Ludwig and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2004 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the glamorous, cruel and often bizarre Hollywood era of the 1950s, Getting Garbo is a hilarious and suspenseful novel of the cinema's Golden Age, when autograph hounds were relentless as they sought the names of stars who became legends in their own lifetime. Nineteen-year-old Reva Hess is a charming autograph collector and the number one fan of Roy Darnell, star of the hit TV series Jack Havoc. Reva follows him everywhere, while keeping tabs on the private lives of film celebrities with her group of expert autograph collectors called The Secret Six. Soon, the slight confusion between Roy's own personality and the dashingly dangerous Jack Havoc becomes an ominous obsession and the novel turns to murder. Along the way, Jerry Ludwig brings the old Hollywood to life, evoking the giant screen figures of Humphrey Bogart, Burt Lancaster, Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra and dozens more, as well as the off-screen ruthlessness of Jack Warner. This is a world where "getting Garbo," the elusive Greta who never signs autographs, is synonymous with the yearning for the impossible, the longing for fame and romance and the blurring of fiction and reality.
Download or read book Garbo written by Robert Gottlieb and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice | One of Esquire's 125 best books about Hollywood Award-winning master critic Robert Gottlieb takes a singular and multifaceted look at the life of silver screen legend Greta Garbo, and the culture that worshiped her. “Wherever you look in the period between 1925 and 1941,” Robert Gottlieb writes in Garbo, “Greta Garbo is in people’s minds, hearts, and dreams.” Strikingly glamorous and famously inscrutable, she managed, in sixteen short years, to infiltrate the world’s subconscious; the end of her film career, when she was thirty-six, only made her more irresistible. Garbo appeared in just twenty-four Hollywood movies, yet her impact on the world—and that indescribable, transcendent presence she possessed—was rivaled only by Marilyn Monroe’s. She was looked on as a unique phenomenon, a sphinx, a myth, the most beautiful woman in the world, but in reality she was a Swedish peasant girl, uneducated, naïve, and always on her guard. When she arrived in Hollywood, aged nineteen, she spoke barely a word of English and was completely unprepared for the ferocious publicity that quickly adhered to her as, almost overnight, she became the world’s most famous actress. In Garbo, the acclaimed critic and editor Robert Gottlieb offers a vivid and thorough retelling of her life, beginning in the slums of Stockholm and proceeding through her years of struggling to elude the attention of the world—her desperate, futile striving to be “left alone.” He takes us through the films themselves, from M-G-M’s early presentation of her as a “vamp”—her overwhelming beauty drawing men to their doom, a formula she loathed—to the artistic heights of Camille and Ninotchka (“Garbo Laughs!”), by way of Anna Christie (“Garbo Talks!”), Mata Hari, and Grand Hotel. He examines her passive withdrawal from the movies, and the endless attempts to draw her back. And he sketches the life she led as a very wealthy woman in New York—“a hermit about town”—and the life she led in Europe among the Rothschilds and men like Onassis and Churchill. Her relationships with her famous co-star John Gilbert, with Cecil Beaton, with Leopold Stokowski, with Erich Maria Remarque, with George Schlee—were they consummated? Was she bisexual? Was she sexual at all? The whole world wanted to know—and still wants to know. In addition to offering his rich account of her life, Gottlieb, in what he calls “A Garbo Reader,” brings together a remarkable assembly of glimpses of Garbo from other people’s memoirs and interviews, ranging from Ingmar Bergman and Tallulah Bankhead to Roland Barthes; from literature (she turns up everywhere—in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, in Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and the letters of Marianne Moore and Alice B. Toklas); from countless songs and cartoons and articles of merchandise. Most extraordinary of all are the pictures—250 or so ravishing movie stills, formal portraits, and revealing snapshots—all reproduced here in superb duotone. She had no personal vanity, no interest in clothes and make-up, yet the story of Garbo is essentially the story of a face and the camera. Forty years after her career ended, she was still being tormented by unrelenting paparazzi wherever she went. Includes Black-and-White Photographs
Download or read book Agent Garbo written by Stephan Talty and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2012 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the life of Juan Pujol, a poultry farmer who opposed the Nazis and concocted a series of staggering lies that lead to his becoming one of Germany's most valued spies, while actually acting as a double-agent for the Allies.
Download or read book Looking for Garbo written by Jon James Miller and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When documentary filmmaker James Main places an ad looking for anyone who knew movie goddess Greta Garbo, Seth Moseley, a salty old reporter dying of emphysema, replies with the promise of the untold story of why the reclusive star left Hollywood at the height of her fame. From his hospital bed, Seth recounts how, as a stowaway aboard the S.S. Athenia steaming toward Sweden, he met, fell in love with, and rescued Garbo from Nazis intent on delivering her to her biggest fan - Adolf Hitler. And, unbeknownst to James, hearing Seth's story decades later will change his own life forever. - back cover.
Download or read book Garbo written by Tomás Harris and published by Dundurn. This book was released on 2004-04 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Juan Pujol, a young Spanish anti-fascist, ultimately became Agent GARBO - the greatest double-agent of World War II. Initially recruited by German intelligence, GARBO came to London after a series of adventures to work for the British. Using a ring of invented sub-agents, he and his MI5 controllers eventually succeeded in pulling off one of the greatest deceptions in history. As a part of Operation FORTITUDE, they convinced the Germans that the D-DAY landings were only a diversionary attack, so protecting the Allied landings and hastening the end of the war in Europe. The release of MI5 case files (kept secret for over fifty years), means that these facts can now be told in full. The report which forms the bulk of this publication reads like a classic spy adventure - enciphered messages, secret inks, items concealed in cakes, exotic foreigners and fanatic nationalists. It was written by GARBO's MI5 case officer, Tomas Harris, one of a group of Cambridge graduates that included the Soviet spies Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby. Mark Seaman's introduction and notes explain and illustrate the crucial historical importance of this MI5 file.
Download or read book Operation Garbo written by Juan Pujol García and published by Biteback Publishing. This book was released on 2011-08-11 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He was GARBO to the Allies and ALARIC to the Germans – the most successful double agent of the Second World War. Indeed, his spy network across Britain was so highly regarded that he was decorated for his achievements ... by both sides. Throughout the war, GARBO kept the Germans supplied with reports from his ring of twenty-four agents. Hitler's spymasters never discovered or even suspected a double-cross, but all the agents in GARBO's network existed solely in his imagination. In one of the most daring espionage coups of all time, GARBO persuaded the enemy to hold back troops that might otherwise have defeated the Normandy landings on D-Day; without him, the Second World War could have taken a completely different course. For decades, GARBO's true identity was a closely guarded secret. After the war, he vanished. Years later, after faking his own death, Juan Pujol García was persuaded by the author to emerge from the shadowy world of espionage, and in this new edition of his classic account, now updated to include his agents' original MI5 files, GARBO reveals his unique story.
Download or read book Greta Garbo written by David Bret and published by Biteback Publishing. This book was released on 2012-06-25 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the male-oriented studio system, Greta Garbo wielded a power no other actress has ever possessed, before or since. Be it producer, director, lover or journalist, Garbo called the shots, and when she decided that she was done with the whirlwind of life as Hollywood's darling she withdrew completely, leaving her public begging for an encore that never came. Though there have been numerous biographies of Garbo, this is the first to investigate fully the two so-called missing periods in the life of this most enigmatic of Hollywood stars: the first during the late 1920s, forcing MGM to employ a lookalike to conceal what was almost certainly a pregnancy; the second during World War II when Garbo was employed by British Intelligence to track down Nazi sympathisers. It also analyses in detail the original, uncensored copies of Garbo's films - with the exception of The Divine Woman, of which no complete print survives - and offers substantial evidence that John Gilbert was not, in fact, the great love of her life. Rather her true affections lay with the gay, Sapphic and Scandinavian members of her very intimate inner circle. Using previously unsourced material, along with anecdotes from friends and colleagues that have never before been published, David Bret paints a rounded portrait of Garbo's childhood in Sweden, her rise to stardom and her all-too-brief reign as queen of MGM. Hers is a truly remarkable story, recounted here with warmth, intensity and unique insight.
Download or read book Garbo written by Barry Paris and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 654 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greta Garbo (1905-1990) is as famous for her reclusiveness as for starring in such enduring classics as Flesh and the Devil, Grand Hotel, Queen Christina, and Ninotchka. In this richly illustrated volume, renowned biographer Barry Paris offers the definitive biography of this fascinating and complex woman -- from her hardscrabble childhood in Sweden to her arrival in Hollywood at the age of nineteen, from her meteoric rise to stardom to her unintentional retirement from filmmaking at the height of her fame, from the new life she crafted for herself to her surprising, and failed, plans for a comeback. Drawing on hitherto unavailable material, including one hundred hours of tape-recorded conversations, fifty years of correspondence, and interviews with Garbo's surviving friends and family, Paris reveals the real woman behind the enigma.
Download or read book The Sewing Circle written by Axel Madsen and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-03-17 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Barbara Stanwyck—to name a few—maintained their images as glamorous big-screen sex symbols complete with dashing escorts, handsome husbands, and scores of male admirers, thanks to studio publicity departments. But off the set, all three box office divas were involved in “lavender” marriages (marriages of convenience, often to gay men) or remained stoically single. They, and several other Hollywood starlets of the era, were members of a discreet women’s “club” called the Sewing Circle, Hollywood’s underground lesbian society. Madsen takes a candid look at the very complicated dual lives these great stars led and the impact their preference for same-sex relationships had on their movie careers.
Download or read book Garbo written by Scott Reisfield and published by Rizzoli International Publications. This book was released on 2005 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation 2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
Download or read book The Savvy Sphinx written by Robert Dance and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the late 1920s through the thirties, Greta Garbo (1905–1990) was the biggest star in Hollywood. She stopped making films in 1941, at only thirty-six, and thereafter sought a discreet private life. Still, her fame only increased as the public and press clamored for news of the former actress. At the time of her death, forty-nine years later, photographers continued to stalk her, and her death was reported on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. In The Savvy Sphinx: How Garbo Conquered Hollywood, Robert Dance traces the strategy a working-class Swedish teenager employed to enter motion pictures, find her way to America, and ultimately become Hollywood’s most glorious product. Brilliant tactics allowed her to reach Hollywood’s upper-most echelon and made her one of the last century’s most famous people. Garbo was discovered by director Mauritz Stiller, who saw promise in her nascent talent and insisted that she accompany him when he was lured to America by an MGM contract. By twenty she was a movie star and the epitome of glamour. Soon Garbo was among the highest-paid performers, and in many years she occupied the number one position. Unique among studio players, she quickly insisted on and was granted final authority over her scripts, costars, and directors. But Garbo never played the Hollywood game, and by the late twenties her unwillingness to grant interviews, attend premieres, or meet visiting dignitaries won her the sobriquet the Swedish Sphinx. The Savvy Sphinx, which includes over a hundred beautiful images, charts her rise and her long self-imposed exile as the queen who abdicated her Hollywood throne. Garbo was the paramount star produced by the Hollywood studio system, and by the time of her death her legendary status was assured.
Download or read book The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll written by Jean Nathan and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2013-05-17 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A glamorous, haunted life unfolds in the mesmerizing biography of the woman behind a classic children's book In 1957, a children's book called The Lonely Doll was published. With its pink-and-white-checked cover and photographs featuring a wide-eyed doll, it captured the imaginations of young girls and made the author, Dare Wright, a household name. Close to forty years after its publication, the book was out of print but not forgotten. When the cover image inexplicably came to journalist Jean Nathan one afternoon, she went in search of the book-and ultimately its author. Nathan found Dare Wright living out her last days in a decrepit public hospital in Queens, New York. Over the next five years, Nathan pieced together a glamorous life. Blond, beautiful Wright had begun her career as an actress and model and then turned to fashion photography before stumbling upon her role as bestselling author. But there was a dark side to the story: a brother lost in childhood, ill-fated marriage plans, a complicated, controlling mother. Edith Stevenson Wright, herself a successful portrait painter, played such a dominant role in her daughter's life that Dare was never able to find her way into the adult world. Only through her work could she speak for herself: in her books she created the happy family she'd always yearned for, while her self-portraits betrayed an unresolved tension between sexuality and innocence, a desire to belong and painful isolation. Illustrated with stunning photographs, The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll tells the unforgettable story of a woman who, imprisoned by her childhood, sought to set herself free through art.
Download or read book Greta Garbo written by Karen Swenson and published by Scribner. This book was released on 1997-09-16 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Life Apart is the first comprehensive biography to fully capture Greta Garbo's hidden personal life as well as her role as a film icon from a female perspective. Brimming with rare photos and startling new information - based on unpublished personal letters and conversations with Garbo's closest friends, coworkers, and lifelong associates - A Life Apart dramatically deconstructs the myriad misconceptions surrounding her life. Intimate, compelling, and often harrowing, this is the true story of an extraordinary woman who lived two lives: one for the camera, the other intensely private and perpetually apart." "Swenson presents a fascinating account of the star's passionate, often tumultuous relationships with lovers and friends, including Mimi Pollak, John Gilbert, Horke Wachmeister, Salka Viertel, Mercedes de Acosta, Leopold Stokowski, Gayelord Hauser, Gilbert Roland, Erich Maria Remarque, Cecil Beaton, Aristotle Onassis, George Schlee, and Cecile de Rothschild." "Meticulously researched, A Life Apart also contains new insight into Garbo's life after Hollywood - from her oft-rumored efforts to aid the Allies during World War II to the failure of her comeback attempt and the birth of her alter ego, "Harriet Brown.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book The Hollywood Studios written by Ethan Mordden and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-01-02 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hollywood in the years between 1929 and 1948 was a town of moviemaking empires. The great studios were estates of talent: sprawling, dense, diverse. It was the Golden Age of the Movies, and each studio made its distinctive contribution. But how did the studios, "growing up" in the same time and place, develop so differently? What combinations of talents and temperaments gave them their signature styles? These are the questions Ethan Mordden answers, with breezy erudition and irrepressible enthusiasm, in this fascinating and wonderfully readable book. Mordden illuminates how the style of each studio was primarily dictated by the personality, philosophy, and attitudes of its presiding mogul—and how all these factors affected the work and careers of individual actors, directors, writers, and technicians, and the success of the studio in general.
Download or read book Deceiving Hitler written by Terry Crowdy and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-12-20 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the war against Hitler, the Allies had to use every ounce of cunning and trickery that they possessed. Combining military deceptions with the double-agent network run by the intelligence services, they were able to send the enemy misleading information about Allied troops, plans and operations. From moving imaginary armies around the desert to putting a corpse with false papers floating in the Mediterranean, and from faking successful bombing campaigns to the convoluted deceptions which kept part of the German forces away from Normandy prior to D-Day, Terry Crowdy explores the deception war that combined the double-agent network with ingenious plans to confuse and hoodwink the Führer.
Download or read book Conversations with Greta Garbo written by Sven Broman and published by Macmillan Reference USA. This book was released on 1992 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hollywood Bohemians written by Brett L. Abrams and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-11-21 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1917 and 1941, Hollywood studios, gossip columnists and novelists featured an unprecedented number of homosexuals, cross-dressers, and adulterers in their depictions of the glamorous Hollywood lifestyle. Actress Greta Garbo defined herself as the ultimate serial bachelorette. Screenwriter Mercedes De Acosta engaged in numerous lesbian relationships with the Hollywood elite. And countless homosexual designers brazenly picked up men in the hottest Hollywood nightclubs. Hollywood's image grew as a place of sexual abandon. This book demonstrates how studios and the media used images of these sexually adventurous characters to promote the industry and appeal to the prurient interests of their audiences.
